‘Get the hell out of the race’: Chris Christie hits Ron DeSantis over debate memo

Image via Jesse Scheckner.

If Ron DeSantis is going to run interference for Donald Trump on the Republican presidential debate stage next week, Chris Christie says he should just end his campaign now, endorse the former President and resume his job as Florida’s Governor.

“People are really beginning to wonder what the hell he stands for,” Christie said. “And if what he stands for is defending Donald Trump, then just drop out of the race and endorse him.”

Christie’s comments during a South Miami campaign stop hosted by Miami’s Community News came in response to a leaked memo from the pro-DeSantis super PAC, Never Back Down. The memo, among other things, advised the Governor to “hammer Vivek Ramaswamy in a response” and “defend Donald Trump in absentia in response to a Chris Christie attack.”

“The only way to beat someone is to beat them, and if he thinks he’s going to get on the stage to defend Donald Trump on Wednesday night, then he should do Donald Trump a favor and our party a favor, come back to Tallahassee, endorse Donald Trump and get the hell out of the race,” Christie said.

Ramaswamy has passed DeSantis in some national polls, and Christie displaced him this week for second place in New Hampshire. Meanwhile, the DeSantis campaign has undergone another reset to reverse his declining popularity among the national electorate.

DeSantis’ campaign reboot no doubt includes strategic recalibrations, said Christie, a former federal prosecutor who served as New Jersey’s 55th Governor. But the last thing DeSantis should do during the GOP debate Aug. 23, he said, is work from a script.

Christie all but obliterated Marco Rubio’s presidential chances in 2016, when he called out the U.S. Senator for reciting a “memorized 25-second speech” that his advisers prepared for him.

“If you’re running for President of the United States, are you really going to let some other group of people tell you what to say, script you on a stage, tell you that this is what you should say about this opponent?” he said. “I don’t need some staff to tell me what I think, what I believe and what I should say. Because guess what? If I become President of the United States, you’re going to want to know that I’m the one making the decisions.

“Yes, we all need good advisers around us and smarter people than us to help educate us about things. But (this) is a strategy memo by a group of people who I suspect have never run for a damn thing in their lives … because what the American people want from a President more than anything else is authenticity. You’re not going to agree with me on everything … but (you’ll never have) to wonder what (I) was thinking.”